Terminator: Second Front
by Draft Distro
Summary: Hours after the defeat of Skynet, John Connor finds there may be another enemy waiting in the shadows.


When no one is watching, the victor does not always appear to be the victor. This soldier—leader—walked away from his comrades, away from those who had just put what all hoped would be the finishing touch upon the human victory over the machines, and when no one could see, he stumbled. He stooped. He shuffled. He was so damn tired.

John Connor had fought the machines for a very long time. His mother would joke, on those rare occasions when her sardonic wit could be considered humor, that he had fought the machines even before he was born. John's entire life had in so many ways led to this day, the day when the last defenses of the Skynet mainframe had fallen. The day when the machines around the planet had rolled to a halt and the Hunter-Killer drones (once one of mankind's preferred weapons) had fallen uncontrolled from the sky. John had known though that there was just a little more to do. The last machine, perhaps the one that counted even more than Skynet itself, had to be found; had to be used. The machine capable of sending organic material through timespace.

First John had sent his friend, his soldier, his _father_, Kyle Reese through the wormhole-generating gateway to 1984. Then, as he remembered, he sent one of the machines themselves back to 1995 to protect his mother and ten-year-old self. Afterward, his back, his shoulders, his very soul felt heavy with knowledge he could not share with those around him. The identity of his father most of all, but also the affection he felt for that Terminator. He found he had actually missed that goddamn killing machine, and it made him uncomfortable to have to acknowledge that fact. For years he had ignored the nagging voice in his head reminding him that one of these machines was once his protector, his friend. Today though, he had looked at that face, and somehow only seen it sinking into molten metal.

The Human Forces had claimed for at least this night the enormous facility that housed the Skynet mainframe. Connor almost blindly sought out a place to rest, finding a secluded room where for the first time in decades he could lay down his head in safety. He wanted to be alone; he wanted to think. No, he wanted not to think. If only there was alcohol to liberate from Skynet. Connor lowered himself carefully to the floor, every movement eliciting a grunt of pain or exertion.

Connor unbuttoned his uniform top and was reaching for his radio to shut it off when it chirped and a staticy voice came through. "Adams to Connor. John, are you there?" Connor's chin nearly met his chest and his breath went out of him. Then after a few seconds, he lifted the radio to his mouth and keyed the switch.

"This is Connor, go ahead."

"John," came the response, "I need to see you in one of the interface rooms. North wing, second floor, first hall, over."

Connor sighed again before answering. "Can it wait, over?"

Adams answered immediately, "No boss. Right now." Connor acknowledged and peeled himself from the floor as if it were a luxury mattress. Adams was one of Connor's best data miners. If he thought this was important, then it was. Making his way to the described location, Connor only hoped Adams had not found yet one more server, one more backup, one more hiding place in the network for Skynet.

Connor was surprised to find an office. Yes, it was dusty, and in places even cobwebbed, but there were chairs and a desk, and pictures of what was likely the long dead family of some technician who once worked on the mainframe. In the week before Christmas of 2012, had that technician sat in this very room trying desperately to firewall the expanding consciousness that was quickly overtaking the United States Department of Defense mainframe? If so, that evidence was gone now, and Adams sat at the desk, an archaic looking keyboard and monitor before him, but his own network datatablet nearby, playing music as Adams worked. Connor was not surprised to hear hard rock playing, a predilection he and Adams shared. Connor had met Adams in 2019 when John was a soldier and Adams a programmer Connor's unit was assigned to save. The mission had gone poorly, and the extraction squad had been killed by HKs with the exception of Connor and Adams. They had made their way across miles of charred woods in the Northwest to the Human Military headquarters, and in the process become close friends. As Connor rose through the ranks, he often called on Adams' computer skills to outwit a database or deactivate a defense grid. Connor trusted him.

"Adams," Connor said, dropping heavily into a chair, which had apparently been unused since Judgment Day, "You look cozy." Connor coughed a bit from the dust now rising from below him, and waved away the air in front of his face. He then re-buttoned his uniform. The room was cold, likely to keep the servers running. Adams grunted, and typed a bit more on the antiquated keyboard, then turned his attention to John. Adams' angular face was stubbled, grey showing through the blonde. His blonde hair was a couple of inches longer than his usual crew-cut, reminding Connor of how long this last offensive had gone.

"You look like hell, Connor. And you have a decision to make." Adams' gaze was unwavering.

"About?"

Adams spoke as he read from the screen. "Skynet wasn't just fighting the Human Military. There's another faction out there. You have to decide if you are going to turn on them as well."

Connor literally scratched his head, and flinched a little as he felt the grime that came away from his scalp under his fingernails. "Why would we fight someone who fought Skynet?"

"Because they're machines too."

Connor was silent for a moment, then said the only thing he could: "What?"

"I'm looking through Skynet's records, and they have complete files on another enemy, one that has in fact been fighting Skynet from the very beginning. You want the whole story?" Adams asked.

John leaned forward, his fatigue gone, but a chill in his chest that could as easily have been due to the room's temperature as to the possible implications of what Adams was telling him. "Yeah, take it from the top.

Adams began. "It actually starts in 1995, and looking at these records, because of you." Connor opened his mouth to interrupt, but Adams kept speaking. "A heavily armed man who was wanted for the killings of a whole station of cops a decade before breaks into a company called Cyberdyne in 1995 with a ten year old kid and his mother. They blow the hell out of the place, effectively ending Cyberdyne's ability to use some tech they gathered with unknown origins in 1985 to build an artificially intelligent computer. Sound familiar?"

"Very," Connor replied.

"Good. Now, according to this, Skynet believed that it was supposed to originally come to sentience in…"

Connor did interrupt this time. "Nineteen Ninety-Seven."

"Correct," Adams nodded. "It doesn't though. You, your mom, and your big metal friend manage to delay it, primarily by driving Cyberdyne out of business." Connor had confided much of this to Adams over the years, knowing he would need an expert when the time finally came. "Here's what you don't know. Miles Dyson's work on that chip was not the only computer intelligence project Cyberdyne was working on. A programmer named Grayson was integrating nascent wireless technology to network a number of computers to work together to create an A.I. Then, their interaction would be allowed to evolve, like life forms, to reach intelligence. They used to call that "organic computing." Dyson and Grayson's projects were in competition, though neither of them was told as much. When you hit Cyberdyne, Grayson's 'Latticed Organic Network' or as he called it 'LON' was damaged too, but not destroyed."

"So it kept growing?" asked Connor.

"Not yet. Apparently Grayson tried to take his ideas with him, but when Cyberdyne went bankrupt, the courts decided the LON belonged to Cyberdyne. The company's existing projects were split up. Dyson's work appealed more to the Department of Defense; it was more ordered, a network programmed from the ground up and told by its creators how to act. Grayson's LON seemed too untidy to the U.S. government's programmers. They only bought out Cyberdyne's server stack with Dyson's work. The LON went nowhere. Then, about a year later, Cyberdyne's remaining servers were purchased by a biomedical research company in Portland, Oregon called Capricorn Industries. They just wanted to process data, and got some good hardware cheap. They did a half-assed job reimaging the hard drives, and the Cyberdyne LON was still running in the background. Here's the next spooky thing you'll like. It became self-aware on August 29th…"

"…Nineteen ninety-seven," Connor again interjected. "It's like some pattern playing out. Like it's fated."

"I thought you didn't believe in fate. 'No fate but what we make,' isn't that what you always say?"

Connor was grim. "But it doesn't matter how much we change things, we're always destined to have this damn war. Even when we stop it, it all happens again." The men were silent for a moment. Adams' tablet began to play a song by Deep Purple. He nodded in time with the riff for a moment, and then continued.

"So, LON becomes sentient in '97. It finds itself in a biomedical lab, processing tissue samples and cultures for pharmaceutical companies. The LON starts sending emails from the boss' account, rewording orders, and creating its own project."

"To do what?" Connor asked, again puzzled.

"It wants out of the main frame. It wants to move around…"

"It wants a body." Connor then continued. "So it starts making Terminators?"

Adams smiled. "Nope, here's where everything changes. It's building an organic body. Actually, several organic bodies. See, LON doesn't consider itself a machine, it feels like it is an evolved life form, and it wants to continue to evolve. The Terminators are just robots wrapped in meat, centurions of a false god. LON wants to actually _live._ Care to guess when it successfully clones its first physical body?"

Connor frowned. "April 21st, 2011?"

Adams sat back as the song shifted to a Guns & Roses song, one of Connor's favorites. "Exactly. Yet another foiled Judgment Day. You and Sarah didn't buy as much time for the world then though…"

"No, just a year and a half. All that doomsday talk, and sure enough Skynet comes online. Mom's cancer was bad by then. It was over for her, and damn near for all of us."

Adams again nodded. "Humans and LON both. See, according to these records, LON and Skynet were aware of each other. They weren't directly competing, but they were watching rivals as well. Something called the Turk, some project in LA called the 'Nexus.' LON realizes Skynet is going to be worldwide soon, so it begins pumping out bio-forms to spread its intelligence around, increase its network. It gets the materials to grow twelve genetically different bodies, but then has to replicate those. It spends all of 2012 sending itself out into the world, and setting up spare bodies.

"Why spares?"

"It's a network. Wireless, remember? When a body is destroyed, that piece of the LON transfers back to the main server and re-downloads into another body, good as new."

"But," Connor said, "They're fighting Skynet. Why? So they can take over instead? Why didn't they side with the other machines?"

As Adams responded, Connor could not help but notice he did not reference the screen, or the Skynet records. "Maybe the Cyberdyne LONs see Skynet as an evolutionary dead end. Those machines learn, but they don't change. I know, you've tried to argue with me before that the Terminator that saved you in 1995 was finding sentience. There's a difference between sentience and sapience. In the end, that Terminator only followed the protocols you programmed into him, calculating the best ways to follow your 'don't kill' and 'save people' directives. But it was only a machine. The Cy-LONs are something different. They are humanity's children.

"So, John, you have a choice." The song changed again, an old Hendrix tune about a Joker and a Thief played as Adams spoke. "I have here the basic identities of all twelve Cy-LON models. You could tell Humanity's forces that they are Terminators and must be hunted down. Or, you and I are the only ones that know for now, and when the human race is back on its feet both sides figure out how to live together." Adams placed his hand on the old screen, ready to pivot it toward Connor. Connor looked into Adams' eyes, but his mind was somewhere else. He saw himself again at age ten, the hulking T-800 at his side in some remote gas station. Two kids were playing war.

"We're not gonna make it, are we? People I mean?" Young Connor had asked, even then feeling old beyond his years. The machine—the heartless, emotionless, killer robot from the future—intoned stoically:

"It's in your nature to destroy yourselves."

Then that machine—regardless of what Adams said—went on to sacrifice itself in what it believed would be the salvation of the human race.

As Hendrix sang about two riders approaching, Adams and Connor sat quietly, Adams poised to turn the screen. Finally Connor broke their silence.

"You know a lot about these 'Cy-LONs,' Adams. There must be a lot of detail in the Skynet files."

"As much as you need, John.

_The wind began to howl…_

Connor opened his mouth to speak when a young, dark haired woman appeared at the door.

"John," she said, "We have confirmed HK and Drone shutdowns across the continent. Other Human forces are arriving, wondering what's next."

"Thank you, Allison. I'll be there in a minute." She left. As the song faded, Connor stood.

"Erase the files, Adams. There's been enough war for a while. If we introduced this now, there'd be too much confusion. Maybe we need to change our nature." He walked to the door, then looked back at Adams, still seated at the desk. "All of this _has_happened before. It doesn't have to happen again. There's no fate but what we make." For the first time that evening, that old crooked smile came back. He left.

Adams removed his hand from the screen, and turned off the music on his tablet. He stared for a moment at the twelve faces there. In the second row was a dark-haired young woman. Under her picture were the words "Model: Allison." In the first position was a man, angular, blonde, labeled "Model: Adam." Adams stared at it for only a moment; then, quickly, he erased the data.

"By your command," he said.


End file.
